Author, Screenwriter, Poet, Sweet Treat Enthusiast and Mom!

Tag Archives: valeriezane.com

Since I had mixed emotions on September by Tracy Kidder (Literary Nonfiction, 131-148), I decided to dig deeper into it and attempt to figure out why. As I stated in my previous response, there were things I hated about it and other things I downright loved.

I immediately hated the way Mrs. Zajac refers to herself, especially early in the piece and in the classroom, in third person. That struck me as weird, set a sort of poor first impression and it also made me feel distanced from her. I wondered how I would feel sitting before her in that classroom while she did that. Would I recognize it as strange or, worse, at such a young impressionable age would I start referring to myself in third person, too? Maybe, like Clarence, I would shout my frustrations out in the hall (notice he also used third person when it would have made more sense to shout “I hate you!” Was he mocking her, too, in addition to his anger?).

In addition to the way Mrs. Zajac specifically refers to herself, the author, Tracy Kidder, also uses third person to tell the story. While that should work fine since he’s telling the story of another person, for me, there was something that just didn’t work about it. It felt overly disconnected and, at times, even cold. The story seemed to be told with a spirit of unreasonable detachment and I wondered if maybe this was due to the fact that Kidder was not a teacher himself. While I liked the way Kidder presented Mrs. Zajac’s point of view, I think, maybe, the story would have benefited from a bit more personal insight on Kidder’s part. After all, even if he wasn’t actually a teacher himself, he had to at one time have at least been a student.

Similarly, the back and forth between referring to her as Mrs. Zajac and Chris felt odd to me, too. While I get that Kidder used Mrs. Zajac’s first name to show a more human and personal side of her outside of the classroom and at home, it always seemed to come across as a bit weird. Maybe since I’m not actually a teacher myself, and therefore I possibly related more to the role of student, but I just couldn’t escape the feeling of wanting her to be “Mrs. Zajac.” Even as an adult who has reconnected and even became friends with a few of my childhood favorites, I still struggle to refer to my own high school and elementary school teachers by their first names.

I liked the way Kidder described Mrs. Zajac and the other characters in the story physically so we could easily picture them. These stand out as gems: “Their faces ranged from dark brown to gold, to pink, to pasty white, the color Chris associated with sunless tenements and too much TV.” Also: “Taking her stand in front of the green chalkboard, discussing the rules with her new class, she repeated sentences, and her lips held the shapes of certain words, such as homework… Her hands kept very busy. They sliced the air and made karate chops to mark off boundaries. They extended straight out like a traffic cop’s, halting illegal maneuvers yet to be perpetrated.” I also loved this insight here: “She never cried in front of her students.”

The more I read about Mrs. Zajac and her story, the more I felt like I could understand her, sympathize and empathize with her. Being a teacher has to be one of the hardest and most self-sacrificing jobs around. Her career choice alone made me feel inclined to like her and root for her as the protagonist of the story. It became clear rather quickly through her interaction with Clarence and by the way she took her work and her worries home with her each night and on the weekends, too, that she really cares deeply about her students and truly wants the best for them. The characterization of Mrs. Zajac was done well. Through Kidder’s careful descriptions, we can see Mrs. Zajac and through her words, thoughts and actions we are able to really get to know her.

I found Clarence easy to picture, too, and I found myself worrying about him and specifically his home situation. But, like Mrs. Zajac, I had no idea really what his home life was or wasn’t like and how he was treated or possibly mistreated there. I had to rely on these “cumes” just like Mrs. Zajac. Mrs. Zajac’s interactions and conflict with Clarence is what drives the story forward and makes us, or at least made me, feel invested in these people and made me care about what was going to happen to them. Still, the ending left me feeling a bit “meh” about the piece. I wanted closure but didn’t get any, and because I didn’t get it I felt disappointed.

Although I was disappointed with the ending because it left me without closure, I also in a way liked it to a degree because I found myself imagining Mrs. Zajac’s arc in the story continuing beyond these pages. I found myself guessing what might’ve happened next to her and to her students, both immediately and in the next few weeks, throughout the school year and beyond. I could imagine anything I wanted to imagine and because of that I didn’t have to succumb to an unhappy ending that might have happened here. I would like to read the rest of Kidder’s book to see what really happened (and to see if the rest of the school year was in fact in line with how I’d imagined it). I’ve always been a bit of a happy ending girl myself so while I guess it would have been easy enough to imagine Clarence dropping out of school or simply continuing his antics, personally I pictured him eventually seeing the light, overcoming the odds, going on to college and someday taking over the world. I wonder if all that’s in the book.

That said; something about the overall tone of the piece, and how that tone shifted along the way, makes me wonder if Kidder intended to instill those initial feelings of disappointment so that he could counter with those teasing feelings of longing, wonder and hope at the end. As I read the piece again, I caught more serious laden tones throughout. Kidder captured the feelings of wonder and unknowing and trepidation and even despair, as well as anxiety and excitement, of that first week back to school for both students and teachers, too. In a way, the story felt like advice or words of wisdom from one teacher to future teachers—much like the “cume” folders discussed and how they’re meant to help the next teacher learn about students’ cumulative pasts.

I felt Mrs. Zajac’s pain and frustration and how tired she already was by the Friday of the first week of school. It’s a long school year and she was already exhausted emotionally and physically. As the saying goes, this wasn’t her first rodeo, and as such she already knew what to expect. But the tone changed somewhere in the middle as a feeling of hope set in. I could feel Mrs. Zajac’s sense of hope that these kids would overcome adversity, have bright futures and that they wouldn’t somehow fall to the waste side of a hard knock life. Toward the end of the piece, the tone shifted a third time, this time more optimistically—but still conservatively optimistic, as Clarence arrived back at school that next day with a seemingly apparent change of attitude and possibly of heart, though no one including Mrs. Zajac could be certain of either.

Throughout the piece, Kidder instilled and then continued to build on that sense of hope. That hope contrasted nicely with the other more serious and somewhat sad elements in the story and it grew stronger and stronger in between the lines. Mrs. Zajac’s hope gave me hope for her, too, that she would find her drive again and rediscover her passion during this new school year. It also gave me hope for Clarence and other kids like him who need that extra push, guidance, inspiration and support—that they would get the things they needed to thrive and excel. I felt Mrs. Zajac had a lot to offer these kids and I would have loved to see how it all panned out at the end of the year but the fact that I didn’t get that sense of closure left me feeling dissatisfied. Of course, this essay, while able to stand alone, was also an excerpt from a larger work by Kidder so structurally speaking leaving us with this teasing cliffhanger ending was highly successful, too.

All in all, I think Kidder accomplished what I think he set out to accomplish here. He made me think about the status of schools today and he got me to care about this specific teacher and her class. The tone of the piece and all those feelings I felt along the way reflected the way I imagine many teachers, like Mrs. Zajac, must feel at the start of each new year and then again at the end of each school year as they say goodbye to their students knowing they may never know what will eventually become of them. A job like that requires a great deal of hope.

As I read this story, that feeling of hope was there to carry me through.

After reading Rock of Ages (an essay about Alcatraz) by Joan Didion, it was brought to my attention by a classmate that the story was written in 1967. Even though I’d read the same thing and I was fully aware that Didion wrote the story in the 60s, knowing that seemed to play little to no role at all in my reading and absorption of the story’s details.

I’m glad she pointed it out though because it means the story was written during a time when Alcatraz was closed and hadn’t yet become the tourist attraction it is today. Like I said, I knew that but it didn’t really click or sink into my head that Alcatraz in the 60s had to be different than Alcatraz today.

See, I visited Alcatraz in 1998 and I recall feeling similar to Didion in regards to the beauty of the island but not so much in regards to the feeling of being isolated mostly because there were a ton of tourists there with me at the time of my visit. Hell, there was even a gift shop. It’s hard to make a place with a gift shop feel like an actual prison (though my husband would argue otherwise). Also, the place had been renovated for tourists so it wasn’t as abandoned looking as Didion had described.

The point I’m trying to make really has nothing to do with Alcatraz itself or even with Didion’s story about Alcatraz. It has more to do with the fact that in reading her essay, though I was reading her words I was picturing the place as it was when I visited in the late 90s and in the condition it was in when I visited it, rather than the condition she saw and described it. I think my own familiarity and memories of the setting interfered with my reading and absorbing some of Didion’s details, if that makes sense. It’s like I was reading the story but my imagination was moving away from the story and into itself and my own perceptions and thoughts.

Since a similar thing happened to me with some of the other essays we’ve covered in this Creative Nonfiction course, including Absences by James Conaway and Mrs. Kelly’s Monster by Jon Franklin (both of which were similar to experiences and relationships I’ve had in my life), I can’t help but wonder if this is a natural thing that happens when we read. Looking back, I wonder how often my own imagination or my own memories and experiences, both positive and negative, have interfered with the intentions of the writer.

Is it possible to read 100% objectively when we already feel connected? I guess in a way it goes back to the idea that we tend to enjoy stories which we can relate to more than those we don’t. Do you think, as readers, our relating to a story, a particular writer, the setting, situation or characters can perhaps play a significant role or even interfere with the story itself? Or more importantly, how we read and digest the story and its author’s messages? I know I’m rambling here but I can’t help but wonder how often our imaginations wander off and we see a story, or parts of a story, which aren’t necessarily there.

I think about my closest friendships and smile as I think how often we finish a friend’s thoughts and/or sentences. Usually we are right, too, because we know these people so well that it’s easy to guess what they’d say or do in a particular situation or moment. But how often are we wrong? How often do we put incorrect words in someone else’s mouth or draw the wrong conclusions?

And, more on topic, how often when we’re reading do we see people, places and things which aren’t necessarily there? Have you ever read a story and pictured the main character as, say, a blond with blue eyes then came to discover s/he was actually a brunette? There are times this happens to me and my mind simply refuses to see the brunette no matter how clearly the author’s descriptions may be!

Maybe I’m just that stubborn but even after going back and reading Rock of Ages a second time, with all of this in mind, I tried my best to focus but still ended up picturing the tourist attraction I visited in 1998.

In Me Talk Pretty One Day (Me Talk Pretty One Day, 166-173), David Sedaris tells the story of his time in Paris while taking a French class taught by an abrasive teacher. He describes his struggles learning the language and the acquaintances he makes along the way, effectively engaging the reader’s sense of humor. In the essay, Sedaris uses the English language in a very calculated manner and he uses the words themselves, both real words and gibberish, not simply to tell the story but also as structural and stylistic tools, too, and devices of theme, conflict, tension, detail, description and characterization, as well as to show us his own character arc.

In this essay, Sedaris exhibits varied levels of vocabulary, sentence structure, diction and grammar to show us his struggle to learn French. By comparison, in the essay, Sedaris speaks eloquently in English. When speaking English, he speaks naturally and in complete sentences but when he attempts French he speaks in simple sentences and often with broken structure and with obvious grammar mistakes. Not only is this quite comical to picture him trying to wrap his mind and mouth around the words but it also makes it easy for us to see his struggle and make sense of his classroom experience. He doesn’t make the essay all about French words and phrases either as that might exclude us if we’re unfamiliar with the language. Instead, he makes it about the feeling of confusion itself and that relatable feeling of exile that comes with it.

Sedaris’s style of writing is more inclined towards humorous, witty, self-deprecating, silly, sarcastic and concise language and that translates (no pun intended) nicely into this piece. Having had struggled myself through six years of Spanish (from which I am now able to freely toss around questions like “Donde esta el bano?” and, of course, such suitable answers as: “El bano esta en el pescaderia!”), I could totally relate to Sedaris’s struggles to learn a second language and his inclination to poke fun of himself and the process.

When Sedaris describes his attempts to speak to his fellow classmates he uses only basic vocabulary words and he uses them in a disorganized structure like they do. I loved when he and his classmates were bonding over their language difficulties and similar negative classroom experiences. He says “it was a conversation commonly overheard at a refugee camp” and that detail was both awful and awesome as it fit the moment perfectly. I couldn’t help but picture Sedaris and his classmates huddled in a corner struggling along in their broken French trying to communicate with each other about this shared experience. There are so many awesome moments in this piece when Sedaris’s unique eye for detail and description allowed me to visualize his story, feel his struggle and picture his experience in my head.

Perhaps the best part of this essay is how Sedaris presents his French teacher to us. Although it’s unclear if she’s really as awful as he makes her out to be or if he’s exaggerating since the majority of his issues with her are due to a language barrier combined with his own frustration, but either way he makes her out to be a rude and cruel monster—albeit a monster who is highly intelligent and fluent in multiple languages. The teacher plays the role of the antagonist and heightens the conflict and tension throughout the story. His interaction with her becomes a lesson on tone, too. Sedaris does an excellent job of capturing the teacher’s snarky sadistic tone and relaying it to us so that, even though we really don’t always know what she said or her intentions, we believe she’s purposely being mean to him and his classmates.

I loved the way Sedaris used gibberish to replace words. All of the parts when he missed something in French altogether and chose to translate it to us as an obviously inaudible or incoherent “meinslsxp” or “lgpdmurct” instead of simply saying he didn’t catch the word or phrase was genius! It put me in the moment and I felt like I also didn’t catch the word or phrase.

When the teacher speaks, we don’t even need to know the word she really said because what we don’t know is made up for through context and tone. For example, when she says “’Were you always this palicmkrexis? Even a fiuscrzsa ticiwelmun knows that a typewriter is feminine.’” In this line, like Sedaris, we are forced to fill in the blanks of what we think she was saying. Because of her tone, it’s clear that she’s insulting him. We do not need an actual English translation to see this, and neither does Sedaris. Additionally, the teacher speaks eloquently with a very high vocabulary and strong diction which shows the reader her high level of understanding of French. This technique is also used when the teacher insults Sedaris directly in flawless English and, in doing so, she adds insult to injury. This increases her power over the classroom, too, since she is the only one who can communicate there completely.

The teacher and her insults play an important role in Sedaris’s character development throughout the story and throughout his learning experience because as the gibberish ends, coinciding with the story’s conclusion, Sedaris realizes he can actually understand what is being said. Even though what he’s hearing is insulting, he’s happy because he finally understands it. This moment is both satisfying and somewhat psychologically dysfunctional he’s still being insulted and, yet, he’s happy that we also feel happy for him

While I absolutely loved this essay, I didn’t like the way Sedaris constantly shifted back and forth between tenses. On one hand, this added to the conversational, informal feel of the story itself and it also sort of played nicely into the whole language lesson themes and conflicts as this was one of the lessons Sedaris struggled to learn. That thought made me wonder if this was a conscious decision and if Sedaris was in fact shifting tenses on purpose to make some sort of point or to carry though the language lesson themes but still, at times, I found it distracting.

The overall point of this essay was to amuse and entertain while showcasing his own experiences and I think he did a fantastic job. Even though I struggled at times with his tense shifts, I truly loved this essay. Not only was it, quite frankly, one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever read but, in terms of language, it opened up a whole new world for me as a writer.

There have been plenty of times, in my own experience as a writer, when I’ve felt bogged down by structural or stylistic rules and other times when I’ve given in and changed something I loved to please someone else. But Sedaris doesn’t seem fazed by what others might think and he doesn’t seem to be playing by any particular rules. There is a sense of freedom to his writing that I really like. For example, I love the way he just threw in a bunch of gibberish nonsense and actually made it work! There have been plenty of times when I’ve second guessed myself as a writer or when I wanted to break a rule or even make up a new word, for example, but didn’t.

Maybe next time I will.

This essay has broadened my thoughts on what can be done. Sedaris has made me realize that there is no limit to my writing. The possibilities are infinite. I feel empowered.

Joan Didion’s essay On Self-Respect (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 142) is a beautifully-written essay about what self-respect is and what it really means. Didion’s tone is open and honest throughout and she uses it, along with thoughtful language and examples to skillfully establish her attitude, thoughts, feelings and her frustrations on the topic of self-respect.

This essay shined a new light on Didion for me and allowed me to see her and her work in a whole new way. While the topic of self-respect could have so easily lent itself to Didion talking down to her readers, it didn’t have the same pretentious tone I’ve come to expect from her essays. For me, it was a breath of fresh air and it caused me to view Didion in the same positive way I had when I was first introduced to her work. The title itself sounds pretentious and I honestly expected the tone of the essay to match and manifest itself into a lecture. But it didn’t.

Instead, I felt connected to what Didion had to say and, perhaps more importantly, to the way she was saying it. For the first time in what felt like a long time, I could relate to her and to her feelings, ideas and thought processes. To me, the essay shines as a powerful representation of how writing can help make us feel less alone in the world and gives us an opportunity to share the burden of our problems and our struggles with others as well as our hopes and dreams, too. One writer to another, I felt connected to Didion as I read her essay.

I love how Didion made her points through dissecting bits of culture and history and time. The line: “Self-respect is something our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about” stands out as a gem in that it’s something we can all understand and agree upon. We all have (or had) grandparents and, whether or not we have (or had) a personal relationship with our own, we each have a similar perception of what grandparents are like. Even if one has never met his or her own grandparents, we still maintain this ideal and hold them up to this sort of standard.

Similarly, by speaking of Indians, again Didion touches on something we all know or believe to be true based on what we’ve learned and/or been told and taught all along. Didion uses common knowledge, bits of history, relatable memories and information we all already know to make her points, perhaps the most poignant one being: “To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”

Wow! I think that bears repeating, so here goes: “To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”

Didion makes broad sweeping points which consistently feel borderline pretentious (or maybe it’s my expectation more so than an actual feeling, though it’s sometimes hard to separate an expectation, once one has been established through repetition and experience, from an actual feeling) at times but then in this particular essay she follows up with examples and illustrations and then turns those examples and illustrations loose on herself to provide another emotional dimension that helps bolster her points and somehow makes her relatable and even likeable.

For example, she states: “That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.” In that moment, I sighed audibly and probably even rolled my eyes and thought “oh here it comes” since I honestly believed I saw the next part—the pretentious and seemingly self-absorbed part where I feel talked at or spoken down to—coming. But, then she surprised me and followed that line by recounting a particular moment when she herself learned this lesson by breathing into a paper bag as an antidote to crying. Of course, breathing into a paper bag to stop hyperventilation is common knowledge (or at least common practice) but as a reader, I paused at this admission and thought “why was she crying?” She doesn’t go into the details in regards to the why but that doesn’t matter. In essence, the admission itself—the fact that there was a time when she was so distraught that she bordered on panic attack and needed to breathe into a paper bag—is to admit she’s human.

On that note, this essay spoke to me as one human speaking to another about an issue we all care about. We all want to be respected. But Didion is saying, something we all know is true, that first you must respect yourself and others. But what does that even mean?

Well, for one, at least for me as I read this essay, it meant me having a moment of clarity, revelation and self-reflection in which I had to pause and say “Okay, enough already, Val. Open your mind and read the essay without trying to guess where it’s going.”

Even if we dislike a piece of work, or even more so have decided to dislike the writer as a result of something he or she has written, we must choose to respect the act of writing and the writing itself for it’s a part of us, too. Disrespecting the writer is, in turn, disrespecting ourselves.

Once I realized this lesson on self-respect, I knew I needed to respect Didion and her writing style, too, despite any previous experiences, and read her essay with an open mind. I could see that I was being disrespectful—to her and to me—and deep down I knew it all along. If I wanted to learn from her and benefit in some way from her writing and from this experience I needed to set aside my griping and grumbling and pay her and her writing their due respect.

Doing so meant respecting my own writing, too, as well as my time and energy as a reader. But beyond that, it allowed me to set aside judgment and preconceived notions of taste in terms of style or delivery and instead to absorb Didion’s message and the meaning behind her writing. As a fellow writer, as a writing student and most of all as a person, I’m glad I did.

To further explore structure and style, and more specifically time and its correlation to tension, my focus will be on the following four essays: Make That a Double, (Me Talk Pretty One Day, 187) and Twelve Moments in the Life of an Artist (Me Talk Pretty One Day, 39) by David Sedaris, Mrs. Kelly’s Monster (Literary Nonfiction, 73) by Jon Franklin and On Self-Respect (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 142) by Joan Didion.

Make That a Double is a brief, lighthearted look at Sedaris’s struggle to learn French. It’s funny and sweet. The essay itself is short and concise and I imagine that’s because it was meant as more of a succinct statement than an actual discussion or debate. There was no bigger picture to it, really. While brief, it’s really the perfect little package. It captures a moment in time, or rather a sequence of time, in Sedaris’s life and uses it to identify a struggle. I love the way the essay flows so naturally through Sedaris’s issues with the language and how he breaks his thought process down so that even if the reader has zero knowledge of French s/he can still “get” it. He uses the element of time in this essay subtly and successfully to establish his point of view and build his argument while backing up his thoughts with actual life experiences, both in and out of the classroom. I struggled with Spanish but I felt I could totally still relate to Sedaris in regards to the idea of the foreign language struggle and the confusion and frustration which come with learning a new language. By nature of the topic itself, the structure of the essay, as well as the examples he uses to make his points, Sedaris lets us know that this is not serious. It’s more of a conversation starter. It’s relatable but at the same time it never goes off topic or beneath the surface either. It doesn’t have to. In fact, part of this particular essay’s charm is that it doesn’t.

By comparison, Twelve Moments in the Life of an Artist is not only physically longer but it also goes much deeper into Sedaris’s life experiences and insecurities. The essay takes a close look at Sedaris’s attempt to be an artist and parallels that with his journey through depression and drug addiction which he refers to as his “long disgraceful blue period.” While this essay was also humorous, like his other essays, I found this one to be deeper, darker and far more personal than the rest. It felt important because of what Sedaris was sharing. By first seemingly innocuously comparing himself to his more artistically talented sister Gretchen, he shows us his younger naked inner-self through the lens of low self-esteem and his insatiable desire to be loved and admired. In the essay, Sedaris drips in other issues, like his mother’s alcoholism and the way his father never took him seriously, to show us where his self-esteem problems may have arisen and how lonely and desperate he became, too, perhaps so we could see and more importantly understand why and how he ended up a drug addict. By paralleling the addiction to his emotional issues like this, we start to see and understand what makes Sedaris tick as we notice a cause and effect quality between his thoughts and actions. This not only causes us to feel sorry for him but it lets us inside, it gets us beyond all the clown makeup and his need to simply make us laugh at him and lets us see what’s really going on in there. Once we’re inside we get to know and understand him better, too, and that emotes a sense of empathy. I love the way he structures this essay. By breaking the essay up into these numbered sort of mini chapters it makes it so easy for the reader to follow along and as the numbers grow we see time pass and we feel like we’re growing with Sedaris on this journey. And it’s all but impossible not to see the correlation between the twelve moments of being an artist and the twelve steps of addiction recovery. It is as if he is in an actual twelve step program looking back at his journey through drug addiction. Perhaps the essay itself is an actual manifestation of the first step: admitting the problem.

While remarkably different in topic and tone, Mrs. Kelly’s Monster is also structured chronologically as it takes us on a journey of its own through a medical procedure attempting to remove a brain tumor in an elderly patient. There is nothing funny about this essay, nor would we expect there to be, but rather it’s a very serious topic and it’s handed accordingly. The tone is serious, anxious and heavy. Early on in the essay, in the intro, when the surgeon is having breakfast (and “no coffee” because “coffee makes his hands shake.”) before leaving for work, we see the actual time of 6:30am. As the day progresses and even as the surgery starts and then transpires Franklin continuously provides time checks and we get to see time pass in this very literal way. Time itself feels like a living, breathing thing in this essay and as we watch it tick by we begin to rely on it and use it as our main source of hope that Mrs. Kelly will survive. To me, this paralleled how a loved one might feel sitting out in the waiting room watching the clock. Perhaps my favorite part about this essay is how Franklin translates the foreign language of brain surgery and medical jargon into simpler terms while using elements of onomatopoeia as well to add rhythm and portray the tension of the moment. For example, the “pop…pop…pop…” is such an awesome technique to pull us into the moment and into that room and allow us to feel and hear and experience it. The pop-pop-pop detail and similar details are repeated in the piece, too, and in doing so Franklin creates a natural if not harrowing rhythm to the piece. In addition to giving us immediate information, in this case that Mrs. Kelly’s heart is beating regularly and that she is still in stable condition, and providing us with a much welcomed feeling of ‘so far so good’ in the experience, it also adds another level of tension, too, and structurally, these pop-pop-pop details allow time to stand still, if only for a few a seconds at a time in a long, dangerous surgery, and give us, as readers, a moment to take our breath in this stressful situation.

Joan Didion’s essay On Self-Respect is a beautifully-written essay about what self-respect really means. And while the topic itself could have so easily lent itself to a writer talking down to his/her reader, it didn’t have the same pretentious tone I’ve come to expect in Didion’s essays. For me, it was a breath of fresh air and it caused me to view Didion in the same positive way I had when I was first introduced to her work. The title itself sounds pretentious and I honestly expected the essay to be a manifestation of that tone and come across as a lecture. But it didn’t. Instead, I felt connected to what Didion had to say and, perhaps more importantly, to the way she was saying it. For the first time in what feels like a long time, I could relate to her and to her feelings, ideas and thought processes. To me, the essay shines as a powerful representation of how writing can help make us feel less alone in the world and gives us an opportunity to share the burden of our problems and our struggles with others as well as our hopes and dreams, too. I love how Didion made her points through dissecting bits of culture and history and time. The line: “Self-respect is something our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about” stands out as a gem in that it’s something we can all understand and agree upon. Even if one has never met his or her grandparents, we still maintain this ideal and hold them up to this sort of standard. Similarly, by speaking of Indians, again Joan touches on something we all know or believe to be true based on what we’ve learned, been told and taught all along. Stylistically and structurally, Didion does not shine a spotlight on time but rather she uses it in subtle ways to make her points, perhaps the most poignant one being: “To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”

Last week I picked apart Picka Pocketoni. So this week I’d like to pick apart—in a more positive way—another Sedaris essay: The Learning Curve (Me Talk Pretty One Day, 83-96).

This essay hit home for me (and I assume for many of you) in many ways, particularly as a writer, writing student and someone who would someday love to teach writing workshops. But also, I’m currently writing a novel and one of the main themes is how we all find ourselves faking it (or feeling as though we’re faking it) at one point or another. We don’t start out being experienced. It takes time but we all have to start somewhere. That’s simply how life works.

Thematically, this story speaks to anyone who has ever felt like a faker. When Sedaris gets his first teaching gig, he feels like an imposter. And in a way he is one. But I bet anyone who’s ever been in his shoes has felt the same way. Of course, while most of us might not admit it or write a whole essay shouting it to the world, personally, I love how honest he is about it.

Sedaris exposes so many parts of himself to us, including: Sedaris as writer, Sedaris as teacher, Sedaris as the child who just wants to be loved and, perhaps most notably in this essay Sedaris as self-proclaimed, self-deprecating, low self-esteem fraud. All of these elements somehow add up to expose Sedaris as a charming, humorous, honest and relatable human.

“Like branding steers or embalming the dead, teaching was a profession I had never seriously considered.” Ha! Me either! Until recently anyway. Workshops have turned me on to a whole new side of myself. I’ve always loved writing and my initial goal coming into the MFA program here was to get my writing to the next level, where I will hopefully get my novels published. My writing has certainly improved but another side of me, one I didn’t know existed, has been nurtured, too. I love reading my peers’ work and offering my feedback. That critiquing part of workshops that so many of us dislike? Yeah, I love that part. In eight grade I was voted “Most Likely to Become a Teacher” and I’ve always scoffed at the notion but now I’m looking at it and thinking maybe my classmates back in 1989 knew something I wasn’t yet able to see or willing to admit. I flashed back to that moment while reading The Learning Curve and as I read about Sedaris’s experiences, I thought about all of these things I’m learning about myself.

I could picture myself standing before a classroom frantically trying to say and do all the right things, trying to make an impact on these students who expect to learn something. Just like any other experience in life, Sedaris started out self-conscious and self-absorbed and once those things fell away, along with all the butterflies, that’s when everything came together for him.

All of this adds to the tone of the piece. I found the tone of this story as well as Sedaris himself as the story’s main character to be honest and sincere. While he, at times, borders on self-deprecation he does so humorously and that adds to the gritty, realistic feel of the piece. Plus, there’s just something sweet about it, too. While each of his essays affects me in different ways and while I don’t find all of them as relatable as this one, I could follow his tone anywhere.

Structurally speaking, this essay hits all the right notes. He grounds the setting for us in the classroom and allows us to picture everything from his perspective. He starts by showing and telling us about himself physically and even adds insight into his mind through sharing his thoughts and fears as well as comparing himself to his father. Then he introduces the rest of the cast of characters and simultaneously presents the main conflicts which will affect all of them. He lets us see the floor fall from beneath his feet as he stands clueless before this classroom for the very first time. We get to see him squirm and then watch as he tries and fails multiple times, continuously adding tension along the way, giving us the opportunity to root for him and care about what happens to him and his students so we feel satisfied when he figures it all out in the end. The work he does with characterization in general but also in particular with his set up and descriptions, are awesome, too, because if we as the reader cannot relate to him or even find him likeable in some way, then surely we can relate to one of his students instead. That’s brilliant!

There was a point when I felt bad for him and for his students, too. Sedaris somehow became the protagonist and the antagonist and his students played villains and victims. He gives us just the right amount of detail to picture him (right down to his briefcase) and enough detail, physically and emotionally, on each of his students to picture each of them staring back at him. In one way or another, through his characters, this story becomes relatable to just about everyone. Additionally, he pays close attention to his own arc in the story. He starts out a little cocky and then falls from grace. We see all of his insecurities and we can see and judge his mistakes and along the way he himself does the same. Eventually he figures it out and succeeds.

The only thing this was missing for me from his experience in the workshop was the actual critique portion and how that transpired in his classroom. He tells us his thoughts on critiquing (he says whoever designed the workshops “struck the perfect balance between sadism and masochism.”) but he never gets overly detailed about the process. But I can’t help but think that may simply be because Sedaris was more concerned with being critiqued and letting us know how he felt than in critiquing his students and/or in watching them critique each other. In a way, it was like he was saying that he only really knows and can speak honestly about how he feels about the situation and if we want to know how they felt, then we’d have to ask them.

In The Learning Curve, Sedaris invites us into a personal side of himself and he shows and tells us more than what “normal” people would dare show and tell. He sets aside any sort of pretense or shield one might have when discussing our views of ourselves, specifically our skills and abilities, and he puts all of his insecurities out on the table for everyone to see and judge.

I absolutely loved this story. I felt connected to it and to all of its characters, including Sedaris and his students. I felt like I was learning along with them and experiencing their trials and tribulations, as if I was actually one of the characters in the story. I felt invested in what happened. The story kept my attention and kept me laughing from start to finish, too.

Sedaris doesn’t seem to care what others might think or say about him; he just puts it all out there, blurting at times, and then lets the experience speak for itself. He lets us decide what’s weird, embarrassing and/or shameful. The fact that he’s not embarrassed to reveal such things makes him charming, I think, and his point of view personable and it’s what makes me feel connected to him and really love reading his essays. I want to know what else he’ll reveal and even more than the content I want to know how he’ll reveal it. It’s safe to say it’ll always be with some level of humor, but there are varying degrees of emotion and sentimentality there, too.

After reading The Learning Curve, I wonder how many new teachers feel like children playing teacher on that first day of school. Sedaris struck a chord here and it’s one that goes beyond the classroom. In truth, don’t we all feel like we’re faking it at one point or another?

I really enjoyed Billy Collins’ poetry book Sailing Alone Around the Room. To me, it felt like stories and there was a casual quality to it that I truly enjoyed. Also, I found many of his poems/stories so relatable that I can’t help but think how awesome it would be to sit at the same table as Billy Collins at, say, a wedding. It seems to me there’d never be a lull in the conversation… though who am I to say? Maybe he’s better on paper than in person! In any event, I loved this book and have added it to my list of books I won’t sell or give away.

Regarding writing a sonnet, I struggled with this form at first. I started and stopped several poems before finally being inspired to write and complete my sonnet about being hung over. That one came to me quite easily the day after my family’s annual Independence Day party. To that end, I think when I’m inspired to write something the writing comes easily despite any particular format, genre, rules or instructions. Once the inspiration for this poem hit me, the words came and sort of slid into the sonnet form. It’s hard to explain, but I imagine you will understand what I’m trying to say here.

I think the sonnet itself has been such a lasting form because it’s fun. For one, it’s short and although that brings with it its own struggles and complications, for the most part I found that the length itself and the rules brought about an interesting and playful challenge. Even though writing the sonnet wasn’t an easy task, it was a fun challenge and I enjoyed it. Also, having rules helped to set parameters for the poem and that was nice in that it allowed my thoughts to be presented in a neat little package. In other words, knowing the rules gave the poem a shape to strive for—much like having a diagram helps a pile of wood eventually look and act like a book case. Knowing I needed to write a sonnet helped my words become one. Without these rules, I’m afraid I might have gone on and on about drinking and being hung over without ever finding a form. In fact, I’m not sure I would have written this poem at all.

After writing a sonnet myself, I can see why so many poets write sonnets and also why so many seem to write them specifically to get their writing gears greased. The sonnet put me in the mood to write more. In a way, it reminded me of the 3AM Epiphany and 4AM Breakthrough books which are full of writing exercises meant to battle writer’s block and inspire writing students to write. As I sit down to write more poetry in the future, I think I’ll try a sonnet from time to time just for fun and for the challenge of it, but also to see if they positively affect me and my writing as they seem to have positively affected so many other writers and poets.